openSOLARIS

I'll start by saying that I know absolutely nothing about openSOLARIS other than that it's a Unix-based OS.
In addition to Linux and OS X, I tinkered for a while with FreeBSD and still have it installed on my Desktop but rarely use it these days although I may well go back to it sometime.
I should further say that my current interest in opnSOLARIS is nothing more than idle curiosity and shouldn't be considered seriously.
OK, so what have I done?
I downloaded the SOLARIS package from here as a VM and started it in VMware Server.
It started without problem and got a wired Internet connection immediately but it really took a long time to boot to a usable screen -- something like 5 minutes. Nevertheless, it does work and I was able to easily bring the screen resolution to 1280x1024.
The WM is Gnome and without delving too much into things, it's almost impossible at this stage to distinguish this OSD from Linux. I was able to use a terminal just as I would in Linux.
Where I ran into a problem was with the install of Opera. I downloaded the Solaris version of Opera 9.62 as a .tar.gz and untarred it. Then I used su to get to root status in the terminal and tried ./install.sh on the unzipped opera. Seemed to go OK apart from complaining about not being able to access some icon images.
However, no Opera showed up under Applications even after a reboot. Plus, typing opera in a terminal just gave a "command not found" even as root. So, this is puzzling.
I later tried downloading Opera as a .pkg.bz2 file which I was able to extract in the file browser. However, I couldn't figure out what to do with the resulting .pkg file. I tried the package manager (which seems very like Synaptic) but got nowhere with this.
Well, it's a start.